Communist World Research Articles

From Brazil to the USSR and Back: the Life Trajectory of Laura and Otávio Brandão

The article analyzes the life of the family of prominent Brazilian revolutionaries — Otávio and Laura Brandão, personalities of the left movement, who fled from the authoritarian dictatorship of Vargas and arrived in the USSR, where they joined the work of the Comintern. Otávio Brandão was one of the founders of the Brazilian Communist Party, worked in Moscow at the Executive Committee of the Comintern, was criticized for ideological reasons. Laura Brandão — poetess, participated in the labor and women's movement of Brazil in the 1920s. In Moscow, she worked for the Moscow Radio in the Portuguese language broadcasting section. Their four daughters (Sáttva, Dionysa, Vólia, Valná) were committed to their parents. In the fate and pre-war life of Otávio and Laura Brandão in Moscow, and then in Ufa, where they and their daughters were evacuated together with the Comintern, the power and inferiority of the world communist organization were reflected simultaneously.

Additional evidence on the final break between Moscow and Tirana in 1960-1961

Disagreement between Khrushchev and Enver Hoxha, leaders of the Soviet Union and Albania, had been ripening since the mid-1950s. Until the spring of 1960 the leadership of the small country did not show readiness to challenge the Soviets perceived as the great power at the head of Socialist bloc countries and the world Communist movement. But when the Chinese leadership indicated their disagreements with official Moscow in the spring of 1960, Albania joined them without fearing the inevitability of open confrontation with the Soviets. The article reveals the further course of events in chronological order during the deepening rift between the two leaders and their entourage, and analyses the Soviet decision-making process at the highest level consulting newly-declassified documents from the Russian State Archives of Contemporary History in Moscow. By the end of 1961, within less than two years, relations between the Soviet Union and Albania sank to their lowest. The Soviet leadership, presumably Khrushchev himself, failed in their attempts to stop another growing conflict in the Soviet bloc by discussing controversial issues face to face with the Albanian leadership. Researchers have already accumulated considerable knowledge about these processes, but substantial gaps are yet to be filled. Many relevant Soviet documents from Russian archives are not yet declassified. Nevertheless, the already available ones allow researchers to take a broader look on the developing Soviet-Albanian rift and to establish how, in parallel with the collapse of Soviet-Albanian connections in the early 1960s, Soviet-Yugoslav contacts intensified.

Decentering American Jesuit Anti-Communism: John LaFarge’s United Front Strategy, 1934–39

In 1934, the Society of Jesus was asked to respond at global and regional levels to the increasing threat of world Communism. In North America, the Jesuits initiated plans to meet the twin threats of Communism and atheism. Between 1934 and 1939, two separate streams of Jesuit anti-Communism began to emerge. The first was a macro-style vision grounded in social reconstruction, which the Jesuits called “Establishing a Christian Social Order,” known colloquially as the “xo” program. The other plan was put forward as early as 1934, and elaborated in July 1936 at the Jesuit meeting in West Baden, Indiana, by the writer and editor John LaFarge. LaFarge’s plan, known as the United Front, has never been evaluated by historians. It was a localized program of reactive initiatives meant to meet the gains of the cpusa with effective Catholic counter-Communist public attacks. LaFarge aimed to recruit students, pastors, and fellow Jesuits to see to it that cpusa gains in labor, culture, education, government, and churches were met with equal and effective public counterattacks. In 1937, the publication of the papal encyclical Divini redemptoris signaled that social reconstruction could become a part of authentic Catholic anti-Communism, indicating the eclipse of LaFarge’s United Front. After 1939, when the Jesuit general Włodzimierz Ledóchowski called for an adoption of the “positive message” of social reconstruction as the dominant means of Jesuit anti-Communism, LaFarge’s more bumptious and militaristic plan began to fade for good. This article chronicles the heretofore unknown struggle between these two antipodes.

THE ROLE OF RADIO FREE EUROPE IN THE IRON CURTAIN COUNTRIES: 1956 POZNAN UPRISING AND 1956 HUNGARIAN UPRISING

The Cold War expanded with the East-West conflict and led to the battle of the great powers. The Soviet Union believed that communism would achieve a victory all around the world and that Western imperialist powers had been historically hostile towards them, and that the Soviet Union was the leading Socialist/Communist state. Thus, the Soviet Union continued to increase its influence and expansionist policies on the Iron Curtain countries. The Americans, on the other hand, tried to intend for the proper tools to reach the communist world under the leadership of the Soviet Union. A global disagreement emerged in the third world countries and ideological conflicts of two superpowers was experienced in the world. In the conflicts, there was no real military intervention between the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead of this, there had been a struggle of proxy wars conducted over third world countries. Radio was one of the preferences of the United States of America in this struggle. To this end, the Radio Free Europe was designed and used by the United States of America for achieving the political goals on the Iron Curtain countries. Radio Free Europe was used as a weapon against the Soviet Union in order to prevent the Soviet Union from establishing its political domination through communist governments in the Iron Curtain countries. Radio Free Europe, which caused historical events in the Iron Curtain countries, met the information and news demand of the region. In this study, the role of Radio Free Europe in the Iron Curtain countries will be addressed and its effects on the 1956 Poznan Uprising and the 1956 Hungarian Uprising will be examined.

‘Peace and happiness await us’: Psychotherapy in Yugoslavia, 1945–85

Previous accounts of psychiatry within Communist Europe have emphasized the dominance of biological approaches to mental health treatment. Psychotherapy was thus framed as a taboo or marginal component of East European psychiatric care. In more recent years, this interpretation has been re-examined as historians are beginning to delve deeper into the diversity of mental healthcare within the Communist world, noting many instances in which psychotherapeutic techniques and theory entered into clinical practice. Despite their excellent work uncovering these hitherto neglected histories, however, historians of the psy-disciplines in Eastern Europe (and indeed other parts of the world) have neglected to fully consider the ways that post-World War II psychotherapeutic developments were not simply continuations of pre-war psychoanalytic traditions, but rather products of emerging transnational networks and knowledge exchanges in the post-war period. This article highlights how psychotherapy became a leading form of treatment within Communist Yugoslavia. Inspired by theorists in France and the United Kingdom, among other places, Yugoslav practitioners became well versed in a number of psychotherapeutic techniques, especially ‘brief psychotherapy’ and group-based treatment. These developments were not accidents of ideology, whereby group psychotherapy might be accepted by authorities as a nod to some idea of ‘the collective’, but were rather products of economic limitations and strong links with international networks of practitioners, especially in the domains of social psychiatry and group analysis. The Yugoslav example underscores the need for more historical attention to transnational connections among psychotherapists and within the psy-disciplines more broadly.

The consequences of urban policies in socialist Yugoslavia on the transformation of historic centres: the case study of cities in Northern Serbia

The socialist and the post-socialist paradigms of urban development are usually described by scholars as radically opposing. However, the cities in the socialist ex-Yugoslavia (1945–1992) present a different development model, defined by the unique position of the country during the Cold War. Balancing between two main ideological blocs, ex-Yugoslavia adopted the values of the non-aligned movement, simultaneously acting as a stage for the cooperation and exchange of professionals. The distinctive combination of socialist and market-driven elements reflected in urban policies, introducing an innovative approach of local decentralization, unprecedented in the communist and socialist world. The evolution of locally based urban policies was especially favourable for the cities with preserved elements of self-government, inherited from previous periods. The cities presented in this article (Pancevo, Sremska Mitrovica, Zrenjanin and Kikinda) follow this pattern due to the Habsburg legacy of strong local governance. Situated in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, these four small cities used the benefits of locally modified urban policies creating a balance between Modernist interventions, implemented during socialism, and the protection of the general outline of their refined historic cores. Considering these specificities and their impact on the urban continuum, this article will use the selected examples and their planning practice for highlighting a new perspective on the urban development manifested before, during and after the period of Yugoslav socialism.

How the world Communist movement celebrated the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia. On the history of November meetings of the communist parties in 1957

How the world Communist movement celebrated the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia. On the history of November meetings of the communist parties in 1957

The evolution of the idea of world revolution in Soviet politics (the rise and collapse of the world socialist system)

Turning socialism into a system on a global scale was the Soviet Union’s highest point for policy of a revolutionary renewal of the world. By the mid 1950s the ever mounting difficulties compelled the Soviet leadership to make a turn toward normalcy; i.e. to acquiesce to a partial scrapping of some of their revolutionary doctrines and moving on to a policy of peaceful co-existence with capitalism. Yet, the spiraling of the world-wide socialist system into crisis was picking up. There occurred some loosening of the hegemony of the Soviet Communist Party accompanied by a drastic politico-ideological polarization within the world communist movement. In fact, the course on advancing the world revolutionary process and simultaneously the policy of peaceful co-existence were clashing with each other constantly. By the mid 1980s the race against capitalism had been lost, whereas the effects of western soft power had been steadily growing. Perestroika and glasnost helped free the minds of the masses but did not resolve the crisis of the Soviet system. This opened the way to a series of bourgeois revolutions and the disintegration of the USSR and of the world socialist system.

Politechnika Rzeszowska

The city as a business center is an organization that includes lower-level organizations along with the Internet as well as the necessary techniques and technologies, as well as an attitude towards changes in relations with clients and placed in the natural and social environment. The purpose of the work is to justify that there is still current theorem from Rykla (2006), that The collapse of the world communist system (Second World) at the turn of the seventies and nineties of the twentieth century caused the breakdown of the political and ideological division of the world, which enabled return to the classical model of the core and periphery in the global economy system . The division is perceived in relation to the countries of Western, Central and Eastern Europe. The global economic and political system of the world has also led to the shifting of the center of gravity of development and the pace of the emergence of new cities as business centers to Asian countries (Lipińska 2018). The utilitarian purpose of the work is to initiate work on the cities’ compliance with the semi-periphery and periphery of the civilization challenge of countries (and even global cities themselves) that are currently more developed. This view was expressed by Z. Rykiel (2006) claiming that the basis for meeting the civilizational challenge should be to understand that the functions constituting the core of the world system are knowledge, innovation production and management of Z. Rykla (2006). Observing the changes in the global economic and political system, it seems that one should seek an answer to the question: Is the return of the world economic and political system to small cities a form of deep ecology, i.e. a holistic view of the trend and progress in the growth of sustainable urban development seeing man as an individual in a global state? A feature of the research is their repeatability and comparability, which means that the result of the research depends on the assumptions made. Key words : big and small cities; ecological economics; environmental economics; sustainable development; the core of the global economic and political system; semi-periphery of the global economic and political system; the periphery of the global economic and political system; background of the global economic and political system.

Gramsci, No Longer a Communist?

Abstract In his last three books, Franco Lo Piparo (a philosopher of language who teaches in Palermo) presents fresh and contested interpretations of the last part of Gramsci’s life. In his view, the Sardinian thinker was distancing himself from the Communist world, not just from the Soviet Union. In the first part of the review-essay I will introduce the three books; in the second part I will then highlight some passages in the books that present Gramsci as a non-Communist thinker; in the final part, I will discuss the comparative analysis of Wittgenstein and Gramsci that the author traces in his last book. I believe that while this can open up new avenues, it is ultimately based on unconvincing and/or vague arguments.

Marian Revelations in the Russian Context

Modern Marian apparitions have often responded to various incarnations of rational Enlightenment political thought, from the 1830 French revolution to Soviet socialism and the international Communist movement. Through her apparitions, the Virgin and her devotees have engaged in “cosmopolitics” by offering an alternative to a purely secular political order. Denying a mechanistic universe, Mary testifies to the existence of a compassionate, personal, miracle-working God. Although primarily a Roman Catholic phenomenon, Marian apparitions are also part of the Orthodox tradition, and the Virgin’s appearances in Russia and Ukraine after 1917 served to critique the new Marxist order. In 1984, the Mother of God continued her venture into cosmopolitics when she first spoke to Soviet citizen and spiritual seeker Veniamin Bereslavsky (“Blessed John”). Over the following decades, as the Communist world collapsed, Bereslavsky built an ecclesiastical organization and an international movement on the charismatic authority of these continuing revelations, which gradually have led him away from traditional Christianity to gnostic dualism. With thousands of followers, meeting in congregations from Ulan-Ude in eastern Russia to Glastonbury, England, Bereslavsky, who now lives in Spain, preaches ecumenical esotericism as a cosmopolitical alternative to Western secularism.

Promoting the ‘China Way’ of communism in Poland and beyond during the Sino-Soviet Split: the case of Kazimierz Mijal

Kazimierz Mijal – a promoter of the “China Way” in Polish communism during the Sino-Soviet split – was not only a nuisance to Warsaw’s leadership domestically but had a certain effect on international politics within the communist world. He was used as a political tool by both Albania and China, and complicated Poland’s delicate diplomacy with both Beijing and Moscow. His long biographical and personal journey – forced but also intentional, grounded in belief and shaped by geopolitics – embodies contradictions and paradoxes of the international communist movement which often spread beyond the reach and control of the Kremlin during the cold war.

The Anti-Semitic Roots of the “Liberal News Media” Critique

Anti-Semitic beliefs that associated Jews, especially New York Jews, with the news media helped create the idea of a “liberal news media.” Anti-Semites around the world have linked Jews with “control” of the news media since the nineteenth century. In the postwar United States, anti-Semitic critiques of the news media were closely linked with Cold War–era anticommunism, Christian conservatism, and reaction to the civil rights movement by white conservatives. Anti-Semites of the postwar period were usually fervent Christian anticommunists who believed that Jews secretly manipulated and masterminded the news in order to promote the civil rights movement, destroy the Christian United States, and pave the way for communist world government.

The politics of outer space: colonisers and missionaries in Russian fantasy film of the 1930s

The theme of the colonisation of other planets in Soviet cinema of the 1930s has so far not received enough attention in film studies, because the fantasy genre was not a major trend in the cinema of that period. Nevertheless, it is important to draw attention to the fact that, against the background of the country’s isolation, within it an interest in the theme of outer space developed and came to fruition among film-makers. Research in the field of fantasy films of the 1930s is coupled here with scientific developments in aeronautics: to a certain extent the films bring these discoveries to the screen, but on the whole film-makers courageously predict the future of Soviet man as conqueror of the depths of outer space. Attempts to develop the theme are realised in the genre of utopia (a narrative about the distant future) in the time of the victory of World Communism, and in the genre of defence sci-fi. The focus of attention in this article is on the aesthetic criteria of the fantasy film and the evolution of the mission of Soviet pilots in the conquest of ‘virgin lands’.

Kraj hegemonije i dominacije u Jugoistočnoj Europi

At the end of the 20th century the SE European region was surviving one of the most difficult periods of changing hegemony and dominance circumstances. The disintegration of the communist world and the collapse of former Yugoslavia, as part of the process, could be considered as the result of the new relations among big powers’ hegemonic systems. The NATO spreads to the European east (Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland etc.), which has direct influence on SE Europe. After new countries (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia) had been internationally recognised in 1992, and the loyal Slovenian and Croatian partnership with NATO in the Kosovo action in 1999 was proved, it is obvious that regional hegemony of the Serbia core region does not exist any more. Also Russian (former Soviet) attempts to play the role of the dominant leader in this region have been suppressed to a minimum. The author discusses European Union interests in this zone, and the way European countries include themselves in the process of pacifying and developing the region. After Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004, Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia are expected to satisfy the conditions for entering EU in next 3 to five years. In the same time Serbia and Montenegro enters a new, more democratic phase of its development.

A Bird’s Eye View of Soviet and World Communism

A. B. Bezborodov and N. V. Eliseeva, eds., Istoriia Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza (History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). 671 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2013. ISBN-13 978-5824318241. Stephen A. Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism. xiii + 658 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-0199602056. 95.00 [pounds sterling]. These two volumes both attempt to take stock of the state of the historical field with respect to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as well as of international communism. Though a host of monographs has been dedicated to the history of various aspects of the Communist Party, a synthetic survey has not been written since the 1960s. (1) The situation is different when it comes to surveys of the history of the Soviet Union, and the number of German-language works is especially large. (2) Histories of international communism have become a cottage industry in Oxford, which recently produced three monographs within a short space of time. (3) The currently available Handbook, edited by Stephen A. Smith, a senior research fellow at Oxford, is comparable only to Stephane Courtois's Dictionnairedu communisme. (4) That author is admittedly something of a bete noir to the editors of both volumes on account of the Black Book of Communism. (5) The authors of the History of the CPSU (Istoriia Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo soiuza) view the latter work as the apogee of anticommunism (26, 74-75); the editor of the Handbook of the History of Communism is similarly displeased with its fixation on communism's crimes (4). Some historical representations of international communism, such as those put forward by Jeremy Brown and Robert Service, are not devoid of a sense of reckoning. By contrast, several contributors to the Handbook might safely be assigned to the end of a spectrum that was once called leftist. For the Russian authors of the History of the CPSU, it is their own, still moving and emotional history that matters, even if each historian obviously takes a different perspective. The two volumes have rather little in common. In my opinion, the task of synthetic overviews is, above all, to convey the fundamental facts, dates, and their interpretations. At their best, they open new perspectives on old problems and critically illuminate both old and new scholarly debates. In the conclusion, I offer a fuller account of these desiderata--ones I wish would be met in all collective volumes of this type. I begin, however, by presenting the most important assertions and historical claims advanced in each book. The History of the CPSU Istoriia KPSS was assembled under the guidance of Aleksandr B. Bezborodov and Natal'ia V. Eliseeva. Tike all the volume's contributors, they work at the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU) and have a distinguished publication record. The introduction to the History of the CPSU makes a number of assertions as to the Party's core characteristics, though they are only partly reflected in the structure of the volume. They characterize the Party as a mass organization; as an apparatus; and as a minimally transparent ruling class making high demands on its members and ruthlessly combating dissenters and enemies, at the very least until 1953. For the period after 1964, the volume highlights the aging of the leading cadres--along with their limited inclinations and abilities toward reform. Chapters 2-6 are structured chronologically. Chapter 7, by A. V. Shubin and F. G. Taratorkin, deals with the CPSU in its international relations and chapter 8, by N. A. Borisov and S. P. Dontsev, is dedicated to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation from 1992 onward. Chapter 1, by Bezborodov and L. A. Molchanov, delivers an in-depth survey of the Party's self-presentation, its archival records and published documents. The historiography of the last decade is presented in a sparsely annotated bibliography, mainly of empirical-positivisitic reworkings of the history of the Communist Party in Russia (62-73). …

И.Г. Старинов и подготовка кадров для «мировой революции» в 1933-1935 гг.

The article analyzes the development of ideas of “world revolution†in Russia, 1917–1935 gg. as a factor determining foreign policy. One of the mechanisms for the implementation of foreign policy during this period was the III Communist international. An important aspect of the military policy of the Comintern was a secret military-political school Karol swierczewski, where he taught I. G. Starinov. Practical training of participants of the world Communist movement in the military sphere is revealed through the teaching of I. G. Starinov. His students will play an important role in military conflicts and national liberation movements of the twentieth century.

Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge . By Sonja Luehrmann

The study of religion in the post-war Soviet Union is virtually a terra incognita for English-language scholarship. During the Cold War, Western scholars were interested in religious freedom in the communist world. But since the collapse of the Soviet system already a quarter-century ago, there have been few serious studies of religious life in the late Soviet period, despite the fact that archives are now at least somewhat accessible for such study and that the topic is of great interest and importance. The challenges to such studies are, however, also significant. The greatest difficulty is that the primary sources are in archives of Soviet institutions whose main task was to control religious communities and ultimately to eradicate religion itself. The sources themselves are, therefore, characterized by hostility toward the very religious communities a scholar may wish to study. It is precisely to this methodological problem that Sonja Luehrmann’s monograph is devoted.

<em>Monopoly Capital</em> Then and Now

Monopoly Capital had an outstanding impact on students of my generation. It was published just as the Vietnam War was heating up, when students and youth throughout the world were beginning to "contest the structures"—to use a favorite expression of that time—and were eagerly looking for analyses of these "structures." Monopoly Capital, written jointly by two renowned Marxist economists, each of whom had already authored a classic, provided just that. It was avidly read in progressive circles around the world.… For students of economics like myself, there was an additional reason for its impact. Economic literature from both the Communist world and from Communist writers in the West tended to underplay the problem of aggregate demand. While Marx had been a trenchant critic of Say's Law and had highlighted the demand problem, it was by this time seen at most as a problem underlying periodic crises, but not one that could affect capitalism in a secular sense, ex ante.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

THE IV CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL ON WAR AND PEACE

Цель. В статье рассматривается проблема войны и мира в документах IV конгресса Коммунистического Интернационала. Этот форум был призван выработать научно-обоснованную стратегию мирового коммунистического движения в условиях завершения становления Версальско-Вашингтонской системы международных отношений. Анализируется не только сложившийся в начале 1920-х годов мировой порядок, но и теоретические и тактические установки IV конгресса по вопросу «империалистических», национально-освободительных, революционных и гражданских войн, а также проблема сохранения мира и создания Соединенных Штатов Европы и Азии. Методологическую основу исследования составляют принципы объективности, историзма, критического подхода к использованным источникам и всестороннего анализа поставленной проблемы. Результаты. В статье прослеживается взаимосвязь теоретических представлений руководства Коминтерна о войне и мире с идеей мировой революции; отмечается, что отказ от нее и поворот «вправо» в решениях IV конгресса связан с внешнеполитическими интересами Советской России; анализируются два различных сценария развития событий, предложенных теоретиками Коммунистического Интернационала. «Правым» лидерам Коминтерна, ориентированным на интеграцию Советской России в мировую экономическую систему, удалось одержать на конгрессе временную победу над «левыми», нацеленными на новое «революционное наступление». Была предпринята попытка сближения с европейской социал-демократией. Выдвинут лозунг «единого фронта». Область применения результатов. Результаты работы могут быть использованы для дальнейших исследований в области истории и политологии, а также в ходе преподавания этих дисциплин в вузе.